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In Cairo, a muezzin calls faithful Muslims to prayer.
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It's the same call that sounds five times a day, every day,
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in cities across the world.
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Nearly a quarter of the people on earth respond to it,
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'God is most great' the muezzin calls.
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'I testify there is no other god but God.'
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'I testify Muhammad is the messenger of God.
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'Come and pray. Come and flourish.
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'God is most great.
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'There is no god but God.'
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In the unfolding of history,
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Islamic civilisation has been one of humanity's grandest achievements.
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A worldwide power founded simply on faith.
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A spiritual revolution that would shape the nations of three continets
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and launch an empire.
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For the West, much of the history of Islam has been obscured
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behind a veil of fear and misunderstanding.
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Yet Islam's hidden history is deeply, and surprisingly,
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interwoven with Western civilisation.
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It was Muslim scholars who reclaimed the ancient wisdom of Greeks.
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While Europe languished in the Dark Ages.
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It was they who sowed the seeds of the Renaissance,
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600 years before the birth of Leonardo da Vinci.
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From the way we heal the sick...
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to the numerals we use for counting...
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cultures across the globe have been shaped by Islamic civilisation.
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But all this, began with the life of a single, ordinary man,
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and the profound message he proclaimed would change the world forever.
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His name was Muhammad.
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To Muslims, the life of Muhammad is a story revered.
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In its mysteries as much as its certainties,
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there are beliefs held sacred.
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Whatever we can tell about the Prophet, of course,
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is screened through the filter of what has been preserved over the centuries
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and what people have wanted to preserve.
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It's very difficult to pull out,
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from all these different sources that are very adoring,
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the ordinary human being...
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We do know that Muhammad was born in or around 570 AD
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in the sun-blasted Arabian peninsula.
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A land of savage scarcity
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whose Bedouin tribes were locked in a constant state of tribal war.
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While still an infant,
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Muhammad's parents gave him his first taste of life in the desert.
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Muhammad was from a town, Mecca,
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but he was sent off to live with the Bedouin
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because the peopl lived in the town of Mecca
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felt that the Bedouin were the holders of the deeper cultural Arab values.
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And the Bedouin view the towns people
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as having lost their really authentic roots in Arab culture
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and the poetry and animal husbandry
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and all the things that they do so well.
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By the time Muhammad was six, both of his parents had died
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and he was taken under the protection of his uncle, chief of his clan.
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Being an outsider gave him a singular perspective.
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He'd been orphaned early
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and developed very early on a passionate sense of concern
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for those who are left out of society.
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To be orphaned in a tribal society
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where clan and family relationships are your keys to everything...
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success, status, honour, dignity...
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is to face what it really feels like to be marginalised.
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That obviously had a very deep impression on him as a young man.
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In some ways, it was detrimental, of course, to grow up without parents.
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But in other ways he was so adaptable.
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He had many parents. He had many fathers.
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He had many mothers. So it made him a child of everybody.
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Muhammad's clan, like Arabs all across the Arabian peninsula,
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would share the stories that had been told and retold for generations.
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Pre Islamic Arabian civilisation was largely an oral culture
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and there was tremendous respect and admiration
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for people who could express themselves orally,
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especially those who could recite poetry almost at the drop of a hat.
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Some of the most important people in a tribe were the poets.
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They sang of the glory of the tribe. They told the story of the tribe.
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To the Bedouin, the word had a mystical importance.
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Poets linked the tribe to its ancestors and celebrated values older than memory.
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Poetry was the sinew that bound the Bedouin together,
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celebrating their victories, lamenting their defeats.
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The poems themselves, like the poems of Homer,
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both celebrate this great heroic ethos
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and yet intimate, in the deepest way,
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the tragedy that, um...
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this war... this ethos of constant tribal warfare brings to people.
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Warfare and conflict were the grim realities of a dangerous time.
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Muhammad's uncle taught him the skills he'd need to survive
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in a world where even a prophet would wield a bow and arrow.
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In a wilderness punished by the elements and bereft of water,
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rivalry over a single well could provoke a blood feud for generations.
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A real rivalry. Real battles, and sometimes quite bloody.
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So the allegiance of individuals was to the family, immidiately,
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and, a larger extent, to the tribe.
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Without the tribe's protection, no one could endure.
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Scattered across the peninsula were countless factions,
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all embroiled in bitter struggles,
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each defending its precious grazing lands, trade routes
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and most importantly, its wells.
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You have to understand that most of the lands are dry.
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So, water is something that everyone always considers precious.
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For those of us in climates that are more heavily watered
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it's difficult to understand the depth and the centrality of the symbol of water
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in societies that are desert
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and in which it only rains once or twice a year
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and in which a little water makes the difference between life and death.
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Each clan had its own separate gods and totems.
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To water and wind, fire and night.
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They were kept in the caravan town of Mecca,
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in a shrine of wood, stone and cloth.
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It was called the Kaaba, the Arabic word for 'cube'.
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Pre Islamic Arabs worshipped a number of spirits.
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They were generally nature-oriented spirits sometimes associated with natural features.
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Like trees or rocks or springs.
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And the Kaaba in Mecca was one of a number of these sanctuaries
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centred around a particular cluster of deities.
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It was said the Hebrew patriarch Abraham himself
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built the Kaaba centuries before
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and that a sacred black stone it held within had fallen from the sky.
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In these turbulent times, the Kaaba provided a rare place of peace.
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Only here would the Bedouin submit to a temporary truce
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before returning to their conflicts of the open sands.
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There was this one place in the middle, around the Kaaba,
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which was, from even pre Islamic times, a place of... a sacred enclosure
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where all people had to put down their arms.
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This, of course, facilitated trading
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because it meant that you couldn't carry on your feuds, when you were doing your buying and selling
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The spiritual and economic importance of the Kaaba and Mecca
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are pretty hard to seperate as far as the pre-Islamic Arabs are concerned.
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The Kaaba made Mecca a vibrant centre for trade.
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Here were found Arabian incense, exotic perfumes and Indian spices,
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Chinese silks and Egyptian linens.
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But perhaps the greatest treasure to be found at Mecca
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was the rich mixture of cultures.
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They were people who came through town
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who had all kinds of interesting experiences to relate of faraway places.
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The local religion was mixed. There were Christians, there were Jews.
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There were also the Arabs of the desert who followed an animist type of religion.
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Muhammad's world was a centre of trade,
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connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean,
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linking the ageing empires of Byzantium and Persia
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to the great bazaars of India and China.
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Muhammad became a merchant.
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In fact, he had a great flair for trade.
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At the age of 25, while leading a caravan northward to Syria,
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his talents caught the eye of the shipment's owner,
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a wealth widow named Khadijah.
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She was so taken with Muhammad, she proposed marriage.
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Ah, Khadijah. Well, I think she was a mentor as well as a wife.
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A very strong lady who had her own business
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and Muhammad was helping her out.
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So, it was a wonderful partnership and I'm sure he learned a lot from her.
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He had a tremendous amount of contact
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with merchants coming from different parts of the world,
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passing through the Arabian peninsula.
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I think he was a very intelligent man, very open minded,
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and he was able to communicate with a great variety of people.
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He must have had great charisma as well.
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Muhammad had a way with people, and with resolving their disputes.
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Once, when the Kaaba fell into disrepair,
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the clan chieftains quarrelled over who would have the honour
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of putting the sacred black stone back where it belonged.
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Before violence could erupt, Muhammad proposed an equitable solution.
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United in the effort, the four leaders shared the weight...
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and the honour.
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In gratitude, they invited Muhammad himself to replace the secret stone.
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He became known as Al Amin, 'The Trusted One'.
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There are all kinds of indications
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that he was tremendously interested in religious questions.
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This is obviously not something
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that an ordinary person probably was interested in in those days.
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He talked to... sages, Arab sages.
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He talked to Jewish and Christian sages who lived in the area.
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He used to go up into the rock hills around Mecca
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and meditate, think about things.
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And at some point he had this extraordinary vision
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which is spoken about very evocatively and allusively.
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In a cave above Mecca,
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Muhammad had an experience that would be the defining moment of his life.
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An angel was said to appear before him in the form of a man,
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instructing him to recite in the name of God, the Almighty.
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For Muhammad, it was an encounter as profound as it was deeply disturbing.
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You get a sense of what it would be like
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to be a normal person in society...
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perhaps unusual in the sense of your intensity for things
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like social justice and finding out what the meaning of life is,
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but not being endowed with anything that would seem miraculous by your friends.
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And all of a sudden having this voice come to you
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and then come OUT of you as you speak it and recite it to other people.
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And that is the beginning of the prophetic career of Muhammad.
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The months to come would bring more revelations...
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powerful words of a lyrical quality,
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more beautiful than the most exquisite Arabic poetry.
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Above all, Muhammad was to bear one message to his people,
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a simple yet radical proclamation.
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That there is only one God.
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The central tenet of Islam is the oneness, the indivisible unity of God.
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Not something that is simply... that one pays lip service to
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but something that is absolutely the most important concept.
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Divine unity is more than saying there's only one God
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and there are no other deities.
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It's only thinking about one thing.
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So, to be thinking about possessions, to be thinking about status,
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to be thinking about power,
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are all intellectual idols.
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The implications were staggering.
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One God meant one people.
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No more tribal divisions.
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To the poor and unprotected, the prospect was revolutionary.
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Seems to me that one of the most important things
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in his early teaching that isn't often talked about
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is the strong social justice message that he delivered.
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In Mecca at the time
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there was an increasing separation between the haves and the have nots.
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He insisted that this was not to be and that we should share the wealth.
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It was this social justice message that, i think,
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really got him a hearing among many of the folks.
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So coming with Islam it was a new order, a new way of life,
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and it was a beautiful way of life
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because everybody was equal... black, white, men, women, children.
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So it had that type of universal appeal
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which I think was the reason why Islam spread so rapidly.
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Many were moved by Muhammad's message
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as he began to speak out in the community.
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It had the suppleness and symbolic depth of the great pre-Islamic poems
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that had been created by this people
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and that had given these people in Arabia
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such an Extraordinary ear for verbal expression,
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where verbal expression was the commanding cultural force.
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Some people called him a poet.
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There's a Qur'anic sura basically saying...
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Muhammad is not a poet.
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Poets speak through desire.
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This is not the voice of desire, this is the voice of God.
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Muhammad's following began to grow.
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They called themselves 'Muslims', for those who surrender to God.
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They set out to preserve the message Muhammad had brought.
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This was the beginning of the Qur'an.
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The Qur'an was revealed orally
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but very soon people realised it had to be written down
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in order to make sure it wasn't corrupted
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and the original message was maintained.
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From a very early date, and it's very unclear when that date was
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because no early manuscripts of the Qur'an survive,
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people began copying it down.
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The Qur'an is a revelation of spiritual teaching,
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of both ethical and social guidance.
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It was revealed, and remains, in Arabic.
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What's so extraordinary about the Qur'an is its naturalness,
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so that it can say the most powerful cosmic things